Jobs

Is There at Least Some Good News in Seeing 4.4 Million Jobless Claims?

Jon C. Ogg

Published: April 23, 2020 10:47 am

Last Updated: April 23, 2020 11:17 am

The number of weekly jobless claims in the past month has been nothing short of mind-boggling. Thursday’s top economic report was the weekly jobless from the U.S. Department of Labor, and its Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed 4.427 million jobless claims for the week of April 18.

While this is a shockingly high number of claims, Thursday’s report was actually a decrease of 810,000 from the prior week. It was also more or less in-line with the 4.3 million consensus expectations published by Dow Jones (WSJ). The prior week’s report also was revised down by 8,000 from 5,245,000 to 5,237,000.

Since mid-March, the weekly claims have totaled more than 26 million.

According to the BLS report, the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was up 2.8 percentage points to 11.0% for the week ending April 11. That is the highest level of the seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate since the Labor Department started measuring it.

The continuing jobless claims, those who are taking benefits for more than one week and reported with a one-week lag, was up by 4.06 million to 15,976,000. That’s also referred to as the highest reading seen in its history. The previous week’s level of continuing jobless claims was revised down by 64,000 from 11,976,000 to 11,912,000.

The number of people claiming benefits in all Labor Department programs for the week ending April 4 was up 4.3 million to 12,506,993. To put that figure in perspective, there were only 1,757,864 persons claiming benefits in all programs in the comparable week in 2019.

Stocks had been flat in the early hours of Thursday, but the expected passage of a phase two CARES Act as support for small businesses is expanded and the recovery seen in oil, all combined to send the Dow Jones industrials up about 325 points (1.4%) and the S&P 500 up 37 points (1.3%).